


Four secrets Robin won't tell and one she tries to

by aperfectsong



Category: How I Met Your Mother
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-13
Updated: 2013-01-13
Packaged: 2017-11-25 06:55:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/636289
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aperfectsong/pseuds/aperfectsong
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Inspired by some of the things Jessica Glitter said during the episode "Glitter" and Robin's lack of concrete back story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Four secrets Robin won't tell and one she tries to

Four

Robin will never tell her friends about the real first time she had sex.

Not the first time that Lily claims doesn't count, where whatever his name was spent two seconds inside her before deciding he was gay, where she snuck out the window of his that pink frilly bedroom and lied to her friends about how good it was and how she broke up with him afterwards because she was more interested in older guys.

But the time a year later where it hurt and she bled on a mattress with no sheets, where he was drunk or high maybe and didn't listen to her saying _go slower it hurts just wait come on Dave stop it hurts._

It was a party she was invited to by a guy her and Jessica had met at the mall after the show had been canceled and her second video had flopped. She hadn't really been seeing Dave, but sometimes he took her out in his pickup truck. He knew all the bars where they didn't ask for an ID. He knew how to sneak into the movie theatres and even though Robin could afford to pay for her ticket, she liked the thrill it gave her to break the rules. He knew all the parties that lasted two full days, where Robin and Jessica could drink free, where guys would flirt with them and give them cigarettes even though they were under age.

It was a party to celebrate someone getting accepted to university. Or maybe getting a job as a car salesman. Robin doesn't remember; she probably didn't even know then. But Dave came and got her around 11, after her parents had gone to bed. She snuck out the window. They stopped at Jessica's on the way to The Castle, the house Dave and his buddies rented from an older man who moved to Alberta.

It was the stereotypical party house: the old couch with scorch marks from cigarette butts landing on it, the carpet stained from sloshed over beer and occasionally vomit that no one knew how to clean out properly, the tower of empty beer cans they were all so proud of, the fridge that always held more beer than food, the bedrooms with their mattresses set up on the floor. Robin and Jessica loved it, the foulness of it, the freedom, so unlike the houses they both grew up in.

They would wear their shortest skirts, take shots of tequila, and dance too close with Dave's friends. The guys were really only nineteen, only twenty, but they always seemed to Robin and Jessica like men. Real men who worked to pay their bills, worked to pay for their beer, their pot. Real men who didn't still live down the hall from their parents and didn't have to sneak out at night because of some dumb curfew. They did whatever they wanted. They shouted and drank and when they fought, they never needed stitches, just a cold brew and a seat at the kitchen table.

It was at one of those parties where Robin found herself on Dave's bed, naked, the sound of music blaring from the old speakers downstairs. The only light was coming from a candle Dave had lit on the nightstand.

"Have you done this before?" he asked her. He was hovering over her, naked. There were no sheets to cover them and the cold air that came in through the cracked window gave her goose bumps.

"Yes," she half-lied, kissing his neck. "I'm ready."

For a full minute he waited there there, looking at her, taking her in, wanting her.

And she wanted him too at first, wanted to be a part of it all: the drunken fights, the smoky house, the morning hangovers from a night she barely remembered, wanted the inevitable destruction it brought out in her, the wildness.

Three

Robin will never tell her friends about the two month period of time after Jessica started seeing her husband (before he was her husband, he was just a guy who wore argyle sweaters and a Rolex wristwatch who reminded Robin of her father). She will never tell them how she felt when Jessica chose Kevin and left Robin by herself.

She will never tell them how she tried to prove she was having more fun than Jess could ever have in her quiet nights watching movies about fake love stories where at the end everyone says the right thing and everyone's happy, in her picnic dates and matching scarves and pet names. Robin had to show her what she was missing.

Robin won't mention all the parties she was half-conscious for, drunk and high, screaming obscenities off balconies, laughing in the wind, using her body to get back at everyone else, picking fights with guys twice her size and with girls who would cry after one hit, taking shot after shot of whatever was handed to her, living her life a blur from one party to the next, losing track of days and entire weeks.

Throwing up in a piss-stained toilet in someone's bathroom with no one to hold back her hair, expelling everything, gagging and gagging until she had nothing left.

The mornings she'd wake up in a stranger's bed with no memory of the night before, sometimes with cigarette burns on her forearms and scratches on her back and arms, and she couldn't remember if she put them there or not.

Likewise, she never tells them about the day Katie came into her room just a kid and took out a cigarette from her purse. How she put it between her lips and pretended to puff. How she looked at Katie in her green dress and matching shoes then at herself in the mirror: her stringy hair and black eye and the hickeys on her neck. How, right there, something in her came apart. How, right there, Katie froze time with her nine-year-old hands and saved Robin from herself.

Two

Robin will never tell her friends about the time after her real falling out with Jessica before they met her, before she moved to New York, where she disappeared for two days and left her phone behind. When her mother called Jessica only to hear they weren't friends anymore; then Jess gave Robin's mom a list of places where her daughter might be. Robin's mother, scared out of her mind, thinking the worst, went into dimly lit bars and dilapidated party houses looking for her daughter, spoke with pot heads and teenaged alcoholics and guys Robin used to go around with, checked in with the Ontario hospital repeatedly, until finally, a police officer came to the house with a description of a girl who sounded like Robin, who had been picked up by an ambulance the morning before.

Her mother found Robin, at last, in the hospital, hooked up to an IV, asleep with sedatives coursing through her veins after overdosing on prescription painkillers in the bathroom at some stranger's apartment. The hospital kept her a few days on the grounds of a suicide watch before letting her go.

Robin will never tell her friends about those two days, partly because the weakness in them embarrasses her, and partly because she doesn't remember much of them herself. She remembers them in colors and flashes and sounds and smells: the crimson red of the man's bed sheets, the smack of his sweat-covered body against hers, the dizziness before she passed out on his cold tile floor, the sound of the ambulance, the antiseptic scent of the hospital room where she finally woke up to her mother crying.

But very acutely, she still remembers wanting to die. She remembers standing naked in an unfamiliar bathroom, hating herself and unscrewing the bottle.

One

Robin will never tell her friends why, exactly, she is afraid of commitment. She tells them her father raised her as a son. She admits to her daddy-issues.

But she doesn't tell them about the fight she got in with her father on her sixteenth birthday, where they shouted back and forth about something that should have been trivial until he slapped her across the face and she lost her balance and fell on her arm, screaming.

She doesn't tell them how afterwards, everything between them changed. Before, he would take her out hunting, buy her the newest handgun on the market, let her take a sip from his glass of scotch when she couldn't sleep. But afterwards, he slipped into the shadows of her life; she saw him only in doorways, looking in as she opened her Christmas presents, poured herself a glass of juice, packed and went away to college.

Neither her father nor her mother ever told her that he never forgave himself for hurting her like his father hurt him, never trusted himself to be around her again. All she knew was that the neglect hurt worse than the slap and the broken wrist combined.

She doesn't tell them that she would have rather had a father who hit her than a father who pretended she wasn't there, who ignored her existence completely. Because at least when he hit her, she saw that moment of guilt afterwards, and for that brief intake of air, she could see something that might be considered a father's love.

On a Friday night in July, they all sit in lawn chairs on the rooftop of Ted's apartment. There's a twenty-four pack of beer in front of them. There's the night sky over them, no stars because of the city's lights, just a vast expanse of black night above them.

They're quiet for a moment, taking it in.

Lily is leaning backwards against Marshall's chest, their feet extended and intertwined around each other like the grown-together branches of two tall trees, Marshall's arms coming together around her stomach in a knot. Lily hasn't said anything yet, but Robin notices the glow about her, the way Marshall hasn't left her size for the past two weeks, the looks they keep exchanging when they think no one's watching.

Ted is nursing his third beer, leaning back in his chair, looking up at the sky, a little lost underneath how infinite it seems; just how during the years of their friendship, they all have been at some point. He has just finished updating them on his plans for the house he's been working on for the life he's still waiting for. _It's progressing_ , he told them. _They've made the second floor stable._

Barney is sitting next to her, his right ankle at rest on his left knee, his hand running lazily through Robin's hair, his eyes breaking from the starless sky every so often to meet hers. He plants a kiss on her neck.

And she exhales. She tries to breathe everything in. She opens and closes her mouth three or four times in quick succession, trying each time to tell her friends how thankful she is for each of them, for everything they gave given her and taught her, for who they have helped her become; for Marshall and Lily being that rock in her life, showing her that the ideal can exist, for Ted and his infallible and unshakable belief in love that she will never admit has rubbed off on her, for Barney who spent a year learning with her that sometimes, the right thing will come to you, that if you survive the rest of it—the one night stands, the hangovers, the anger and pain, the abandonment, the loneliness—you will learn it was all for something. She is so glad in that moment she can barely contain herself.

But Robin Scherbatsky will never tell her friends exactly how important, how necessary they are to her life, and how thankful she is to have them. Instead, she will sit at the bar and laugh at their stories, she will be the person Lily comes to when there's something wrong, she will drive Marshall to the airport in a blizzard, she will make Ted's girlfriends feel comfortable even when Lily won't, she will keep Barney's secrets, be a constant whose presence holds them up. She will do whatever it takes to keep them.

She will never tell them that meeting Ted Mosby that night in September was probably the single greatest event of her life.

She will never tell them how much she felt like she was holding onto a life raft in the middle of the ocean, starving for something she couldn't name, dying for a drink from a rain that wouldn't come, waiting for her fingers to slip from the raft and for her to drown in an ocean storm so far from land, from anyone she knew, that she would pass on so unnoticed and so alone.

She will never tell them that it was by a miracle that Ted approached her, drawing her into their little group, saving her as he might have done pulling her raft to shore, breathing air into her lungs.

There's something in the July air that's like a panacea, that's like a sort of magic.

Robin tries to tell them, but all that comes out from her lips is a low sigh.


End file.
